7/9/14

The Agony of the Cleats

As of this writing, the United
States soccer team has been eliminated from the 2014 World Cup competition. This
leaves the usual futbol suspects like Germany and Brazil to stomp each other’s
toes in a quest for glory, and it means Americans can officially go back to not
caring about soccer. We can feel relieved about this since, as I understand it,
the World Cup matches will continue for at least the next eight months (with
additional time added, depending on penalties and injuries) – or maybe it just
feels that long.

I’m no sports fan. I am one of the hopeless dorks to whom any organized game of
ball handling will always appear as a blur of meaningless motion and
Nuremburgian chants. I don’t know a foul line from a free-throw line. However,
having grown up in the shadow of our slamdunk culture, my sensibilities have
been sufficiently Americanized so that I can see the basic problems U.S. fans
might have with the rest of the globe’s holiest of sports. I may not like
McDonald’s, but I get why Big Mac eaters don’t like bangers and mash.

It’s true that America suffers
from a knee-jerk isolationism where foreign cultures are concerned. Personally,
I see the World Cup as a transoceanic conflict, in which America should not
intervene. National pride is at stake with the World Cup. Grievances over
post-war treaties and trade agreements going back to the Diet of Worms feature
in the fervor of international soccer rivalries. It goes much deeper than
American sports fandom, where we simply choose which team colors are the
prettiest. The irony is that these age-old grudges of warring nations are being played out
with such a tepid, pastoral sport. This, I believe, is why soccer fans are
known to riot in the streets: The game itself simply isn’t violent enough to
satisfy. But curiously, America has had little success exporting our patented
brand of ultra-destructive sporting events elsewhere in the world. Our monster truck
rallies, NASCAR explosions, and Ultimate Fighting Championships never catch on in
Nigeria or Tel Aviv. Go ahead, just try to find a WWF cage match anywhere in
Switzerland. Americans crave aggression in their sports. Look, I know we still love boring
old baseball, because of grandpa and Hank Arron and Lou Gehrig’s speech when he
landed on the moon (I’ll Google this later for accuracy), but we all know that
isn’t really the Great American Pastime. It’s football! Good old, two-fisted,
bone-crunching, concussion-riddled, NFL-style football, snuffing out the
careers and general health of its young players within the first quarter of
their first professional games. By this standard of steroid-fueled brutality,
the basic objective of soccer is simply not hazardous enough for most Americans.

The essential problem is
obvious: Americans can’t handle the no-hands thing. The players knock the ball
around with kicks and head-butts in perplexing denial of the opposable thumbs
passed down from our prehistoric kin, looking like dolphins at Sea World. We
can’t imagine Knute Rockne flailing about this way. It simply doesn’t fit
our profile of rational sporting behavior. At no point is Lionel Messi going to
do the reasonable thing and just pick up the ball to run for a touchdown.

This is why World Cup fans can
become ecstatic on the rare occasion a goal is scored in soccer. The challenge
of maneuvering a ball into a net using only feet and heads is like trying to
eat pudding with chopsticks and dislocated thumbs. Finally reaching the goal
can seem like a beautiful victory after all that handicapped effort. The result
is a match with little or no scores, something else unsatisfactory to the
American sports fan accustomed to 437:383 wins in basketball (the soccer of
quadrupeds). All this running and diving for the ball can result in injury, of course, and
this illuminates another notable difference in our respective footballs.
American players are encouraged to stifle their reactions to their fractured
vertebrae and snapped femurs on the field. This is in keeping with the
mythology of American manliness, like the boxer who keeps bravely returning to
the fight instead of staying on the mat to look for his teeth. With soccer,
there is a strategy in convincing referee officials that an injury warrants a
penalty, so the players are prone to elevating their scrapped shins to the
level of Shakespearian agony. With enough writhing drama, an injured player
might even summon the shallow, orange coffin FIFA uses as a stretcher, as if the
wing-back is being taken directly to his funeral. Don’t get me wrong, soccer has its share of serious, crippling injuries (this
year’s World Cup featured a very bad spinal injury and even a Tysonesque biting
incident), and anyone who has tripped over the coffee table on the way to the toilet
knows how painful even the simplest shin smack can be. But
this expression of collapsed anguish doesn’t seem limited to boo-boos. Soccer
players often fall on their backs in grief when the opposing team scores a goal.
At the end of a match, losing teams often look like war casualties, strewn
across the field of battle, pounding the astroturf in misery over their defeat.
Crying! I’ve seen actual crying! In the case of the French team, it’s difficult
to tell if a player has been injured or is simply overcome with ennui. It could be argued that this emotionalism simply means other nations express
their passion for football more fervently than we do. But here’s how I know
soccer fans don’t take their sport as seriously as they pretend: There’s no
halftime show. There are no cheerleaders, no marching bands forming team logos,
no one getting shot out of a cannon, no floats celebrating holidays, no wardrobe
malfunctions. How can Americans gain respect for the World Cup when it features
no Beyonces or Timberlakes before the second half? They don’t even debut
exclusive Budweiser or Speed Stick commercials. It’s almost like they WANT us
to ignore their sport! And well, ignore it we do. With the US team out of the World Cup, Americans
return to their comfortable Cotton Bowls and Indy 500s, relieved that they no
longer have to watch guys run around in gym shorts. But soccer obsessives
around the world who berate us for our ignorance should take heart; there are
some cultural pastimes which Americans have embraced with gusto. We’re rather
fond of Cinco de Mayo and Oktoberfest, for example. And closer to the point, we
do enjoy a rollicking game of foosball on occasion when the spirits have moved
us. Baby steps.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

It would be wonderful to say, no Ashley you are wrong, but I can't be that dishonest. I am afraid you are pretty close here! The USA could benefit from joining the world in laying down the weapons and just play soccer one month every 4 years or so. We might learn something! Even the metric system one day!

Insightful, fun read. As for the sport not resonating here tho', it's a game full of subtleties, something America has little appreciation for...

By the way be careful about one not finding the WWF in Switzerland. I almost got sent to Berlin this year to do caricatures for some huge international convention centered around that U.S. cage -match fighting phenomena....

Who's Responsible for This?!

is an illustrator and opinionated crank living in the bygone century known as South Carolina. His wide variety of neurotic quirks and extreme sensitivity to broad social trends are chronicled as The Symptoms, a continuing blog of sophisticated tantrums. Ashley's work has appeared in many defunct publications and hard-to-sell books. He is considered a complete failure by those envious of his genius. He has a website for some reason: www.ashleyholt.com